Connecting Wagner College, Poland, and Uganda during COVID-19

Connecting Wagner College, Poland, and Uganda during COVID-19

What was supposed to happen during the spring break in March, 2020 for eight Wagner College students, the program manager for performing arts Diane Catalano, and Professor Steven Thomas was a trip to Poland. The special Expand-Your-Horizons (EYH) course was called “Global Literature from Africa to Poland.” The class was going to compare literature from eastern Europe with literature from eastern Africa, including some literature about the Jewish holocaust. Wagner College was able to partner with the University of Warsaw in Poland through Professor Kamil Wielecki. Wielecki was a visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Anthropology department at Wagner in 2017-2018, and he and Thomas taught a special ILC course together back then. Adding a third continent to this intercontinental experience, Thomas had arranged for one of the authors from Africa that the students would be studying, Doreen Baingana, celebrated author of the book Tropical Fish, to travel from Uganda to join the students on their trip to Poland.

What was imagined was a joyous week in Poland where the students and faculty from Wagner and the University of Warsaw along with a famous African writer would engage in cultural exchange, visit museums, and discuss ideas about literature and culture. From Warsaw, they would also travel to Auschwitz and Krakow. But the week before the trip, universities across the world suddenly had to close their campuses in response to the rapid spread of the Coronavirus.
One by one, universities in America, in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa sent their students home.

What to do? The students were deeply disappointed about losing this opportunity while professors Thomas and Wielecki were depressed that their months of planning and preparation might all be for nothing.

So, instead, to salvage the course, what professors Wielecki and Thomas invented on the fly was a virtual transnational experience, connecting Wagner College with both Poland and Uganda. Using video-conferencing software (Zoom), their classes could talk directly with Baingana in Uganda. One of the Polish students was so inspired after their on-line conversation that she immediately translated one of Baingana’s stories from English into Polish and published the translation in a local on-line literary magazine Wizje (or “Visions”).

Later, the University of Warsaw students also chatted with Thomas about his research in Ethiopia while Wagner students chatted with Wielecki about his research in eastern Europe. Wagner history professor Lori Wientrob also volunteered to be an on-line guest speaker to discuss the history of Auschwitz and the memory work of Wagner’s Holocaust Center.

Meanwhile, Wagner’s IT staff quickly added the University of Warsaw students to Wagner’s on-line course-management system (Moodle), so that the students from both countries could partake in a shared educational experience and talk to each other on-line. Many students continued their international conversations on their own through social media. Although the experience was not the dream that had been originally planned, there were some precious moments here and there of productive and expansive connection.